"All that you need to know about boars can be summed up in the fact that if you wish to hunt them, you must have a specially made boar spear. This spear has a crosspiece on it to prevent the boar from charging the length of the spear, driving it all the way through his own body, to savage the human holding the other end."- Boar and Apples, by T. Kingfisher

Most folks who grow up outside of rural areas have a poor notion of how large pigs are - and by extension, how large boars are.

God knows I did before discovering the stuff I'm putting in this post.

It's amazing, the number of people who don’t understand how enormous, terrifying, and tenacious wild boar are.

They’re like if bears had knives protruding from their closed mouths and Didn’t Know When To Quit. Their survival instincts when they’re wounded aren’t “run away and minimize injury” it’s “take the thing that hurt you down with you” They also make sounds like someone crossed a pig with an alligator.

Their head and neck alone can be like the size of an entire human torso.Also amazed at people who think domestic pigs are tiny, ‘cause we designed those things can get in the neighbourhood of a thousand pounds in ideal circumstances.It’s like when people assume Tuna must be small because they’ve only ever experienced them in hockey puck form.

Pigs will eat people, if given the chance.That’s why boar hunters use a team of very tenacious dogs to hold the boar so they can be speared without destroying you. The dogs must wear body armor and even then often experience severe injury.

I’ve heard stories of people shooting boars, and if it didn’t kill them, it just pissed them off.

WIld boar babies are rather cute......but the adults and their ferocity have been associated with warriors for thousands of years, from Mycenaean Greece, through Celtic Europe, and in Ancient Rome. A number of Roman legions also used a boar as their crest - I wonder did they squabble over which was the “right” one, the way a couple of Swiss cantons had a little war over whose bear was best…?

There was also Anglo-Saxon and pre-Viking helmet crests, right up to the late Middle Ages (famously, the white boar badge of Richard Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III of England), and the blue boar badge of the Earl of Oxford, more usually represented by the De Vere arms, quarterly gules and or, in the first a molet argent.After Richard was defeated at Bosworth in 1485, there was a run on blue paint as inn-signs were changed to reflect new loyalties since Oxford was on the winning side…

And I wasn't kidding earlier, pigs will definitely eat people.It gets mentioned in the movie “Snatch”, the book/movie “Hannibal” and the webcomic “Lackadaisy Cats”, among numerous other fictional sources, and IRL it’s suspected to be the reason why numerous missing persons have stayed missing.

Even in mythology, Odysseus’s old nurse recognizes him by the scar he got from the boar-tusk slash that almost killed him - it wasn't because he was a poor hunter, but because he was nearly destroyed by his prey.

So it really baffles me how often folks in WoW laugh off this hunter pet as a joke thing, naming them after various pork foodstuffs and such. Boars, even without the added armor and spikes Blizzard has inexplicably chosen to add to their newest models, are a surprisingly valid threat.

I think that they usually aren't taken very seriously by players because Blizz doesn't take them very seriously. At times they are fewed as a threat, but often they are treated like jokes. Though, in a world of dragons, undead, and magic, they are a joke compared to those things

Interesting read, thanks for posting that. They are so much bigger than a pork chop. Mmmmm....pork chops. I made the best pork chops tonight! And now the boars will revenge their fallen brother, it seems.

I don't take boars seriously in WoW because of their ridiculous waddle. The graphics for their run animations just seem wrong.

You shut your dirty mouth! That's the whole reason I still love vanilla boars! I wouldn't mind a visual update, but if they ever get rid of their adorable waddle and wiggle-run, I'll send Blizz a flaming bag of poo.

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